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What's it like to be the real life mother of someone who wrote a best-selling book that was made into a TV series? Now try to imagine that real-life story being fictionalized to include a much-less-than-flattering version of yourself.
Does some of it hurt? I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting a bit, but I'm fine. Really.
The Netflix series Girlboss was (is -- it's still streaming as of the posting of this piece) about the life of a quirky female entrepreneur who, with no college and no seed money, sold edgy vintage clothing online and became an almost overnight success. When watching it for the first time, my thought was that a lot of people would be clueless when reading the words that flashed across the screen before each episode:
“What follows is a loose retelling of real events...real loose.”
To many, the series would not be interpreted as a work of creative non-fiction — from the characters to the timing to even the nature of the events taken from the book itself. People who never read the book would never know. And there was little I could do to enlarge the mental capacity of viewers who couldn't grasp this disclosure.
I will admit that I have been in disbelief over a LOT of things that have happened in my only child's life (she is, after all, the reason I began writing about bringing up challenging kids for Psychology Today) over the past ten years since she first started her eCommerce business out of a bedroom. I watched as her almost otherworldly life blossomed and she got added to list after list of accomplished people.
This mother-daughter duo agreed a while back that the moment either of us took all this too seriously, however, it would be a sad day indeed. It was about staying grounded, continuing to connect with friends and family who pre-dated her fame, and never looking back as if any of this were more than the result of a smart, hard-working kid who put blinders on in an attempt to avoid answering to a REAL boss. Now in her 30s, she is still in that mode, thank God, and continues to write in one of the most authentic voices I have ever heard, eclipsing my writing ability many times over.
But how can you not be thrilled when you are first told there is going to be a TV series about your kid? Because I was told this would become a semi-fictional comedy while the storyline would use many of the elements from the original book regarding how my daughter built her business, I have often been asked if this was truly necessary on the writer's part. This has been my answer: Depicting my daughter sitting hour after hour in her “sad bunny” robe in front of an iMac surrounded by piles of outgoing packages, grabbing cold water bottles from a dormitory-sized fridge, and schlepping to the main house to do laundry would not have constituted entertainment. Building an online retail clothing business is grindingly hard work, demanding an unparalleled focus and attention to detail, affording little time for boyfriends, club-hopping, and walking tours of San Francisco as depicted by the series.
Outgrowing the pool house and hiring her first employee off Craigslist, my daughter moved from place to place, eventually ending up with corporate offices in LA and hundreds of employees. Even she was in disbelief. Then things got messy, but the series did not get that far.
While the book is chock full of interesting memoirs of a young but unusual life, a huge amount of creative license went into creating this off-beat show. In the end, however, the world was not ready for a strong, flawed, unlikeable lead female character even though the public has been accepting of males in roles like this for years (think movies like American Hustle, Wolf of Wall Street or TV series like Breaking Bad).
On to my surrogate on-screen part in all this. After being told at first that my character is to be killed off before her daughter reaches adolescence, I magically get resurrected as a narcissistic alcoholic mother who abandons her child and sleeps her way to the bottom. Now picture her offspring: an angry, lost, defiant young female character who at first alienates people who show her kindnesses, valuing them only after realizing how their absence would create a horrible void. This is the caricature my daughter was spun into. And it was evidently too much for the average viewer to stick with through the last episode. Since it made sense this character would have grown up with an AWOL mother, it fit the narrative. Were I not a writer myself, I may never have ever been able to grasp this.
Unfortunately, this explanation did not stop friends, family, and Facebook fans from being angry over how I was portrayed. In the big scheme of things, however, had my daughter never become someone notable, none of this would be a topic of conversation. I know the truth, my baby girl knows the truth, and that's all that matters to me.
Despite the show not being renewed by Netflix for a second season, it was still an honor for me to see such notables as Charlize Theron and Kay Cannon take such a rapt interest in my daughter's book and in her life.
This, however, will be the extent of my self-defense as a crappy TV mom.
